[Web4lib] blue sky thinking

Thu Jul 27 16:11:38 EDT 2006

This should be a running joke in the computer world: Whenever there's a 
problem, someone will suggest "buy a Mac" as the solution. :-) I know 
that Mac users consider their chosen machine to be "easier". Funny, most 
of the posters here also consider THEIR chosen machine/software to be 
"easier." (Or "easiest"). When you know how to do something, it's easy, 
ok? Or perhaps, you do what you find to be easy, whatever that is.

What our conversation here is about, or could be about, is that there 
are skills issues that are keeping many libraries from being able to 
take on certain technologies. My own "test" was in response to folks 
saying about a particular product: "It's easy. Why aren't more libraries 
using this?" And I proved to myself that anyone with three weeks of 
time, lots of manuals, friends, and near-infinite patience could 
possibly get it up and running; I have no idea what ongoing maintenance 
would be like. But that's not what most libraries need as a solution. 
(And I'm trying to avoid making this argument specific to the particular 
app I was aiming at, because I think this is true for many "informal" 
applications -- i.e. those that aren't part of a library systems package.)

I love the stuff that people are doing with new technologies, but 
getting them into the mainstream of libraries is another thing. Sadly, 
it seems that many libraries will only get technology when library 
vendors start including it in their offerings, as has happened with the 
OpenURL resolution services, and ERM systems. But I wonder if we haven't 
overlooked a market possibility: if outsourcing your server could give 
libraries greater potential, why hasn't anyone created a library or 
non-profit specific service for this? Or if they have created it, why 
don't more libraries know about it? I know that libraries are not rich 
so as customers they aren't terribly appealing, but it seems that there 
are a lot of unmet needs and yet no one is appearing to profit from 
them. Maybe our concept of "library system" needs to expand so that it 
can include the library's web site and a bunch of interesting web 
services. On second thought, we probably first need to expand our 
concept of "library" to include a web site and interesting web services.

kc

p.s. BTW, I also did the "Mac" experiment, albeit about a decade ago. I 
got a Mac and used it as my only home machine for 2-3 years. I never 
liked the interface, nor the computing metaphor of the Mac. It's like 
the difference between being a "visual" person vs. a "word" person, or 
the different ways that people learn. There's no one way that will be 
best for all of us, which is why monopolies in the computing field are 
bad. I really appreciate that Linux gives you a choice of GUIs -- I wish 
we had that with other operating systems.

Roy Tennant wrote:
> Karen,
> There are ways to do things and then there are ways to do things. For
> example, steps 1-3 could have been accomplished simply by buying a Mac.
> Macintosh computers come not only with Unix installed, but with a pile of
> basic applications such as Apache, MySQL, etc. Then, many other Unix
> applications come in simple packages you can download and install as you
> would a shrink-wrapped software application. And now that Macs can run
> Windows, I can't imagine why anyone would buy anything else.
>
> I know that isn't your particular situation, and I feel your installation
> pain. I certainly have been in my own "dependency hell" before, where you
> want to install something but first you have to install ten other things
> upon which it depends. I also had a situation one time where the particular
> version of something caused another application to fail completely upon
> installation. It took months of chipping away at as I had time before I
> solved it. The error messages are often completely cryptic and don't always
> point to the root cause.
> Roy
>
> On 7/27/06 8:25 AM, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> Keith D. Engwall wrote:
>>     
>>> Aside from having a good firewall to sit behind, what is the biggest reason
>>> against doing this in-house?
>>>
>>> We just put together an Ubuntu linux server for about $600 with 1 GB of RAM
>>> and 400 GB of storage space.
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>> Having heard many statements/arguments for using open source software,
>> about a year ago I decided to do the experiment myself. I meant to keep
>> notes about how long things took me, what problems I ran into, etc. but
>> it was so frustrating that I just couldn't immortalize it in a fixed
>> form. But it went something like this:
>>
>> 1) Get operating system and burn to disk. Since I was starting with a
>> blank slate, I had to find a copy of the OS and get it onto a CD so I
>> could install it. The particular application I was aiming at wanted that
>> to be Debian. This was easy, maybe a half hour (note: I read the install
>> documentation before downloading most software).
>>
>> 2) Insert disk and boot up. Answer install questions. Here I got stuck
>> for an entire afternoon, believe it or not. First, there were lots of
>> questions to which I did not know the answer, so I was back to my other
>> machine to read more documentation. Then there was one menu that
>> absolutely stumped me -- not because I didn't know the answer, but
>> because I didn't know how to make an "x" appear before my choices. I
>> moved the cursor (tab tab tab) to the right spot and typed "x" -
>> nothing. I typed "a" "b" -- basically I went through the entire keyboard
>> - nothing. Added "ctrl" before them - nothing. Shift - nothing. I looked
>> at the online documentation. It just said "select the ones you wish to
>> install." Nothing on how to select. The next day I tried again, and only
>> by accident did I hit the space bar - BINGO. So I wasted 4 hours because
>> nowhere did it say that the way to select an item in a menu is to use
>> the space bar. OK. I got over that.
>>
>> 3) I now had a basic OS installed, but in order to run my app I would
>> need things like MySQL, Apache, etc. I would need "packages." I have
>> some experience with Red Hat (until they abandoned all of us desktop
>> users), with Suse, and with something else that I don't remember now.
>> Each has its own way to install software. I was on the phone to a friend
>> who is quite well versed in Unix, so he offered to help me go through
>> the package process. The first thing he told me to do was type
>> "dselect". De-select? To get things? No, it means something like debian
>> select, and you go through menus to get to a huge list of possible
>> software packages to select and install. All I can remember about this
>> is hours spent going through lists, selecting something I needed, only
>> to get a screen saying something about dependencies, but no explanation
>> of what I should DO about them. Many many hours. Eventually, I had stuff
>> installed, but no idea if any of it would work. I didn't write it down,
>> but this took days -- days because I would occasionally install the
>> wrong thing and then want to uninstall it, or I'd go to install
>> something and it would ask me questions I couldn't answer. In the end,
>> the thing that always frustrates me about Unix is that I don't know
>> WHERE my installed software is. There's a logic to it all, I'm sure, but
>> I've yet to find a clear explanation.
>>
>> 4) Now I installed the app I wanted to run, although it then needed some
>> changes to things like Apache, etc., to work properly. I spent another
>> day or so doing all of this. In the end, I actually was able to start my
>> app. But at that point I had run out of steam, and the machine has been
>> turned off since then. Maybe I'll spend my summer actually getting the
>> app up and running as a functioning system. Then again, maybe not.
>>
>> kc
>>     
>
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>   

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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